Earlier this month, our CTO, Henry Mowat, had the amazing opportunity to sit down with Aley Hammer, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), to discuss the growth of Coates Group in the digital space. A huge thank you to the AWS Team for connecting with us on a great community chat.
Read below for a brief summary of how our digital innovations are enabling our clients to better connect with their customers or watch the full video here.
Brief Introduction about Coates Group
Henry Mowat: Coates Group is a technology business based in Sydney, focused on developing digital signage solutions that impact the customer journey and deliver technology that drives personalisation back to the customer at the point of purchase.
How does our business enable our clients to better connect with their customers?
Our technology CMS platform, Switchboard, drives personalised content down to our individual customers in physical locations. We’re especially focused on elevating the in-restaurant and in-retail experience, inside the bricks and mortar environment. We prioritise delivering not just visually aesthetic content but also, on how we utilise data and analytics to show the right message to the right customer at the right time. We combine our customer’s data as well as external data to achieve a tailored customer journey that is targeted to the time of day, the location and other relevant variables that are relevant to you as an individual customer.
How do we incorporate human elements into any of our encounters?
We believe that human connection and human touch is so critically important, especially in the unexpected situations of today, created by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we’re seeing is that brands and customers have had to respond with changes in their operating models and the ability to communicate effectively and rapid is crucial so much more today. Using digital merchandising as a medium allows brands to educate customers when they arrive at a location, turn up in a drive thru or even a store. We focus on not only what customers interact with in-store and what they purchase, but also how they interact with brands and their products.
How does AWS fit in?
AWS has been with us on a journey since we launched Switchboard about seven or eight years ago. We’re grown and evolved with AWS and it’s been fantastic. AWS provides all our cloud services and with the continued evolution of their tool sets, we’re leveraged AWS’s stack. It has allowed us to look at ways to focus on what we’re good at, which is influencing the customer journey, and not have to worry so much about servers, back-end and infrastructure. We’ve maintained a close working relationship with the AWS team to understand how we can always better our structure and build our architecture in a more efficient and cohesive manner.
Anything exciting that’s coming up for Coates Group?
Our team is always innovating on the cloud side, with regards to efficiencies that we can gain from evolving our architecture as well as how we can service our scalability and increase cost efficiencies of what we’re using from a cloud architecture perspective from a customer side. We’re also looking into how we continue to drive personalisation and how this data can leverage a real-time experience from a customer with other technologies such as mobile technology.
